Home is Where the Self is... Magnified, Multiplied and Dissolved

As we were reaching the third decade of the 21st century, the impossibility to get out of the house, sometimes enforced by the police and the army, radically changed, for billions of people and almost overnight, the value of spaces and modes of being we used to take for granted. On the big chessboard of meaning, all parts are connected, and policy changes sent shockwaves at an intensely personal and human level. For a moment that felt indefinite, the World outside was no longer a place where you were allowed to feel at home; it was now both a hostile hot zone and a Lost Paradise, whose mythical, sensual memory was revived through the cold proxy of windows and the newfound dominion of houseplants. No matter how big the windows were, the walls between them grew thicker with time, backing the Self into a corner. For millions, the crisis outside sparked an intense moment of exploration inside, the familiar home an increasingly exotic and complex territory for the body and the mind. And indeed in the present case, the camera---with its ability to expose film more than once---became a flickering searchlight, probing the Self, its complex relationship to the environment (both serendipitous and essential), and its endless reinvention, sometimes on the verge of dissolution.